In the development of internationalized software applications, translation of the user interface content is a tedious, error-prone, and lengthy process. Known complex software applications use a number of modules or plug-ins (e.g., over 50 modules or plug-ins) to define the function and behavior specific to an application. Each module or plug-in has at least one language-dependent, translatable file. A help plug-in for an application may contain one translatable file for each help topic, which can easily exceed 100 topics (i.e., 100 translatable files) for a large application. Preparing a large number of translatable files (i.e., exported files) for export and translation into multiple languages and the handling of returned translated files (i.e., imported files) is aggravated because one exported file results in multiple imported files (i.e., one imported file for each of the multiple languages). Typically, the exported file to imported file ratio is 1:9 or 1:14. Further, the process of importing the translated files is made difficult by specific file placement requirements dictated by the framework of the application being developed. Still further, known automated translation systems that receive and translate the translatable files may introduce hard-to-find formatting and/or syntax errors into the files themselves, where the errors may cause the application to fail and may not be apparent until runtime. Thus, there exists a need to overcome at least one of the preceding deficiencies and limitations of the related art.